On this, his 90th birthday, I thought it fitting to look back on this BAFTA award-winning TV series from 1972, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. Ways of Seeing is a four-part BBC series of 30-minute films, created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name.

The series and book critique traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

In the first programme, Berger examines the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past.

The second programme deals with the portrayal of the female nude, an important part of the tradition of European art. Berger examines these paintings and asks whether they celebrate women as they really are or only as men would like them to be.

With the invention of oil paint around 1400, painters were able to portray people and objects with an unprecedented degree of realism, and painting became the ideal way to celebrate private possessions. In this programme, John Berger questions the value we place on that tradition.

In this programme, Berger analyses the images of advertising and publicity and shows how they relate to the tradition of oil painting – in moods, relationships and poses.

From his album Respect, released in 2006, the year before he was killed during a hijacking.

I had a dream last night
One that will stay with me for a long time
One that will stay with me,
For as long as I live.
We were living in a world, there was no pain
We were living in the world there were no hungry people
Everyone was at peace with one another

There was a man in my dream
He told me he’s from the future,
Coming to give something better [Repeat x3]
Even though I know that

[Chorus]
One monster dies another one comes alive.

I had a dream last night
It was my dream but I know it is a dream
Of a lot of people in the world
To be living in a world, with no homeless people
To be living in a world where little children
Don’t have to die, because their parents are poor
When we came to this world
We were prepared to fight a battle.
But we found a war
When we came to this world,
We were prepared to fight demons
But we found the devil himself

There was a man in my dream
He told me he’s here
To gimme something better
Even though I know that

“Quite simply – and this is what I wish to discuss tonight in relation to the question of rage and violence – we are living in different times. Or at least, our time is disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity.

“The spectre of revolution, of radical change, is in young peoples’ minds and politics, and it is almost nowhere in the politics of the anti-apartheid generation. In fact, even as they criticised young people just five years earlier for being apathetic and depoliticized, they have now thought student activists misguided, uninformed, and mad.

“You would think that it might be possible to resolve this difference in time by means of a careful reading of what is called the ‘objective conditions for revolution’: are we in fact in a time in which revolution is immanent? No matter the subjective experience of time – there must be a way of determining who has the better bearing on history, who can tell the time. What time is it? Yet to tell the time is a complex matter in this society.

“We are, to some degree, post-apartheid, but in many ways not at all. We are living in a democracy that is at the same time violently, pathologically unequal. Protest action against the government – huge amounts of it, what in most other places would signal the beginning of radical change – often flips into a clamour for favour from that very government. Our vacillations, contradictions and anachronisms are indication that what time it is, is open to interpretation.

“I want to argue that the comrades I have worked with in the student movement are not so much mad as they are time-travellers. Or rather, that their particular, beautiful madness is to have recognised and exploited the ambivalence of our historical moment to push into the future. They have been working on the project of historical dissonance, of clarifying the untenable status quo of the present by forcing an awareness of a time when things are not this way. They have seen things many have yet to see. They have been experimenting with hallucinating a new time…”

This chillingly insightful documentary on the Marikana massacre should be required viewing for every South African. It’s two years tomorrow since that terrible, indelible day. The film is available to watch in full on Youtube for a few days only. Don’t miss this opportunity.EDIT: 18/8: The film is no longer available on Youtube. Please visit its website to find out about future screenings.

In August 2012, mineworkers at one of South Africa’s biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages.

Six days later, on 16 August 2012, the police used live ammunition to suppress the strike, killing 34 and injuring many more.

Using the point of view of the Marikana miners, “Miners Shot Down” follows the strike from day one, showing the courageous but isolated fight waged by a group of low-paid workers against the combined forces of the mining company Lonmin, the ANC government and their allies in the National Union of Mineworkers.

What emerges is collusion at the top, spiralling violence, police brutality and the country’s first post-apartheid massacre. If you still have any doubts that this was a premeditated massacre by Lonmin, the government and the police, this documentary will change your mind with a lot of previously unseen footage. Nobody will have an excuse after watching this to continue to blame the miners.